Nietzsche, nyet

The boorish philosopher, Friederich Nietzsche

There seems to always be room for a few prominent atheists, perhaps just to keep the pot boiling. From Voltaire to Dawkins, a sort of prophetic / jester slot exists in the culture ... a talk show provocateur, out to unsettle the settled pieties of the age, even if the age, like ours, is largely atheist to start with.

Nietzsche briefly played this part with his famous pronouncement that god is dead, we killed it, and we had better come up with some other moral landscape for ourselves in its absence. An excellent review of Nietzsche's thinking is Rüdiger Safranski's philosophical biography, which lopes through Nietzsche's life and works with enthusiastic but also critical eyes.

I have to say, however, that I do not share Safranski's enthusiasm. I find Nietzsche in the end undisciplined, unsystematic, unsympathetic, and unconvincing. For all the flashes of insight, his thought does not lend itself to a coherent critique of his own or the contemporary age, let alone to the progressive, liberal, meliorist political and social direction that I believe is culturally desirable.

Let's do some quotes, to get a feel for the area. Safranksy describes Nietzsche's mid-career infatuation with Wagner, and the possibilities of art serving religious functions for modern man:

"If art is to rescue the essence of religion, it must succeed in bringing about a lasting inner transformation of people. Ephemeral pleasure in art will not suffice. The will to art as religion pushed at the boundaries of the merely aesthetic event, wihch is a source of great distress to artists who, like Wagner, regard themselves as founders of a religion. ...
Wagner sought to achieve a sacral, redemptive effect by means of his *Gesamtkunstwerk. Art must mobilize all of its power. The music supplies a language for the 'inexpressible,' which comprehends only feelings, and combines with the action on the stage, the gestures, the facial expressions, the sert design, and, above all, the solemn ritual of the festival days in which people gather around the altar of art."

All this is certainly well known on the religion side of the culture, from the sumptuous Catholic processions to the pop-guitars at your local megachurch. But always, there is a point. What is the point of Wagner's über-art, or in turn, of Nietzsche's version of the same principle? As far as I can make out, it was not the spreading of compassion, or the communal nationalism founded on an enacted origin myth. It seems to have been self-reflexive, art for art's sake, because art makes us feel so great.

I agree with the importance of art in this way, but it will hardly supplant religion on this principle alone. Something more would be needed - content.

The content, as far as any exists, is hazy nationalism and general Germanic cultural triumphalism. In this, neither Wagner nor Nietzsche were Nazis before their time. But the Nazis were heavily Wagnerian and Nietzschean. They saw quite clearly the tone of what both had done. The total artistic spectacle was something the Nazis were particularly enamored of, as documented so well by Leni Riefenstahl.

But Nietzsche did have some penetrating insights into the science-religion and science-art debates, as summarized by Safranski:

"It is common belief that the mere presence of something is the simplest thing in the world, but actually it is the most puzzling thing of all. It is easier and more natural to imagine a God and an entire animated nature, because in doing so we project onto the external world what we ourselves are- namely spirit, consciousness, and soul. The greatest challenge is to posit a blind, opaque, merely existing being. .. By immersing himself in the attributes of knowledge, Nietzsche touched on the enigma of being devoid of consciousness. He contended that it is the spontaneous tendency of knowledge to encounter its own principle in all of nature precisely because being devoid of consciousness is actually inconceivable and unfamiliar to it. 'In the great prehistorical era of mankind, spirit was presumed to be everywhere and it did not occur to people to revere it as a privilege of man'".

Which is what Freud would later term "projection". And what relationship do either science or art have to truth?

"Artists shape, create, and produce a new reality. Scientists observe reality. The artists provides forms, and the scientist supplies truth. From the perspective of the artist, Nietzsche discovered in science a fictionality that tended to remain suppressed and unacknowledged. Science seeks truth, but the imagination is also engaged in the process- more than scientists care to admit. Science aims at finding truths, but invents them as well. Art readily acknowledges its basis is imagination; it creates a world of illusions and weaves a beautiful cloak to lay over reality. Whereas science demands that truth be unveiled, art loves veils. Since art is well-versed in invention, it is no secret to art how much invention and drive for refined education is involved in science, much as science is loath to acknowledge that. Nietzsche called this disparity the 'problem of science' as seen from the perspective of art. 

When Nietzsche ventured to contemplate art from the perspecitive of science, he found that its central quandry was a claim to truth. This claim to truth is generally just as unacknowledged in art as is fictionality in science. Art wraps its implicit claim to truth in illusions, and science conceals its implicit fictionality in its claim to truth. Nietzsche attacked art for feigning truth that it cannot provide."

Obviously, this applies particularly to that art called religion, whose veils are steeped in the deepest shades of denial.

Safranski discusses the Greek culture of scientific truth and philosophy, as exemplified by Socrates:

"According to Nietzsche, however, if reality is regarded as increasingly penetrable and controllable, if the first material successes of this culture of knowledge occur in the areas of technology, production, medicine, and the social sphere, and if the hitherto alarming phenomena of natural forces become natural and thus calculable and theoretically controllable causalities, a feeling of optimism extends irght down to those in the lower social strata, who will now begin to share in the dream of the 'earthly happiness of all'. If it become increasingly more feasible to control nature by means of the sciences, why should it not be possible to eliminate the injustice that in inherent in society as well?"

But Nietzsche was not pleased by this prospect at all.

"Nietzsche regarded the Socratic spirit, scientific progress, and democratic upheaval as linked together in this manner. Why, then, was this state of affairs so unappealling to him? Why was he afraid of democracy? We have already seen the answers to these questions in our earlier discussion of his defense of slavery. ... 'In order to have a broad, deep, and fertile soil for  artistic development, the overwhelming majority must be slavishly subjected to the necessities of life to serve a minority beyond the measure of its individual needs.'"

This brings us to the Übermensch, Nietzsche's model of his ideal, a person with no morals or scruples, other than self-actualization. A psychopath, in short. But a highly artistic one, with lots of slaves! One can tell that the Nazis were reading closely here, despite their lip service to socialism and "Volk". The Führer principle is laid out here, in a way.

"In great men, the specific characteristics of life- injustice, lies, and exploitation- are at their greatest."

While one can make many allowances for a philosopher being provocative and seeking book sales, (at this point late in his [sentient] career, Nietzsche had sold hardly any books), the drumbeat of elitism, anti-democratic principles, and valorization of power and ruthlessness is as persistent and unmistakable as it is unforgivable. Nietzsche knew very well what he was doing. He knew the slave societies of antiquity, and took them as his model so that exemplary thinkers and artists (such as himself!) could justify humanity by their own existence and works, and somehow push it forward to something solipsistically called "progress".

The irony is that, for all his vaunted re-evalution of all values, and dismissal of the sheep-ethics of Christianity, Nietzsche was the ultimate Victorian, a prisoner of his time, infatuated with the romanticism of power and of the "great man": in history and in art (and in philosophy!). A romanticism that led straight into the world wars of the next century. It was almost as bad as the Hegelian romanticism of inevitable historical dialectic, which led to its own brand of horrors.

A great culture is made up of more than great men, great works, and great passions. It is made of everyone else too, and of empathy and decency and self-discipline. Of functioning institutions, broad prosperity, and cosmopolitan values. Apollo had a point, as much as Dionysus, and indeed, without patient Apollonian cultural structure and continuity, no Dionysian exuberance can develop into great works, however defined. I'll end with Nietzsche's sneering put-down of bourgeois values, in "Thus Spoke Zarathustra":

"What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?" -- so asks the Last Man, and blinks.  

The earth has become small, and on it hops the Last Man, who makes everything small. His species is ineradicable as the flea; the Last Man lives longest.
"We have discovered happiness" -- say the Last Men, and they blink.  

They have left the regions where it is hard to live; for they need warmth. One still loves one's neighbor and rubs against him; for one needs warmth. Turning ill and being distrustful, they consider sinful: they walk warily. He is a fool who still stumbles over stones or men!  

A little poison now and then: that makes for pleasant dreams. And much poison at the end for a pleasant death. One still works, for work is a pastime. But one is careful lest the pastime should hurt one. One no longer becomes poor or rich; both are too burdensome. Who still wants to rule? Who still wants to obey? Both are too burdensome.  

No shepherd, and one herd! Everyone wants the same; everyone is the same: he who feels differently goes voluntarily into the madhouse.
"Formerly all the world was insane," -- say the subtlest of them, and they blink. 

They are clever and know all that has happened: so there is no end to their derision. People still quarrel, but are soon reconciled -- otherwise it upsets their stomachs. They have their little pleasures for the day, and their little pleasures for the night, but they have a regard for health.  

"We have discovered happiness," -- say the Last Men, and they blink.

• America, breaking bad.
• How did the homeless get here?
• Why we are for Obamacare.
• We can cleanly resolve the debt ceiling issue.
• Republicans and democracy. Note how Republicans are trying to get by extortion what they can not get by democratic means- you know, by electing a majority of lawmakers, or by persuading them by policy arguments. Looks like they have taken a page from Al Qaeda. There are any number of issues, such as NSA lawlessness, high unemployment, lack of prosecution of white collar crime, where the Republicans as a party out of power could mount a very persuasive case for policy change on the merits. But the proposals they choose to make have no merits, at least not in a democratic system, to the majority of citizens, so they resort to terrorism. It is shameful and appalling.
• But hey, at least the base respects their GOP.
• Joan Walsh seems a little fed up.
• Why the mortgage market will never go private.
• “It was also generally accepted that the incomes of the wealthy should be left untouched in all but the gravest emergencies.”
• Media patsies didn't do much investigating of the financial crisis either. Fraud and embezzlement were rampant.
• Markets aggregate perspectives, not just information. But are they rational? Not really.
• Winner-take-all, or cheater-take-all?
• Financial advisors are routinely unethical and do not meet a fiduciary standard.

Protein shimmy & shake

Hemoglobin is a complicated puzzle, not just a carrier of oxygen.

Hemoglobin- the stuff of love and horror, cupid's arrows and Dracula's lust.. what makes it tick? What even makes it red? It certainly isn't the protein. 16,000 daltons of clear protein carry a clear ~700 dalton heme group, whose iron, neatly caged in the middle, only absorbs green to blue light strongly when bound to oxygen. So a very small, if critically important, bit of the protein complex is responsible for all of its color. A bit like the heart being responsible for all of our love.

But the encasing protein does a lot more than just lug the heme ring and its iron around. It is responsible for a few special effects that make our breathing more efficient. These are called allosteric effects, for the way miscellaneous molecules can reshape or regulate a protein, especially its binding of other molecules. One is the Bohr effect, where CO2 (and acidity in general) regulates the oxygen affinity of hemoglobin. In the high CO2 / elevated acid environment of the peripheral tissues, oxygen affinity is reduced, while in the more neutral environment of the lungs, it is raised, appropriately enough.

Another is the cooperativity of the hemoglobin tetramer. Binding one oxygen increases the affinity of the other (and quite distant) three sites for oxygen, again helping speed the process of loading and unloading oxygen in the appropriate places. And a third is the Haldane effect, where, conversely to oxygen, the binding of CO2 is increased in the acidic environment of the periphery. CO2 doesn't bind to the central iron-heme site, but elsewhere on the protein molecule, facilitated by several acid-sensitive histidines.

Fourth is the action of carbon monoxide, which is not really allosteric, but simply competitive, binding 200 times better than oxygen to the central iron binding site, and thereby shutting it down completely, suffocating the victim. The encasing protein of course has other functions as well, and we see one in sickle cell anemia, where the normally cleanly separated tetramers that float around in the red blood cell at very high concentration (35 grams per 100g of packed red blood cells) start to gum up and aggregate due to a single point mutation, (when present in both genetic copies), leading to misshapen red blood cells, and all the other morbidities of this disease.

While most of this molecular intricacy is understood in rough terms, researchers are still nailing down details, and a recent paper used novel statistics and molecular modelling to tease out some more of them. Hemoglobin could be thought of having two stable shapes, called T (tense, with low oxygen affinity, high CO2 affinity), and R (relaxed, with high oxygen affinity, low CO2 affinity). The issue is that in the tetrameric hemoglobin complex of two alpha chains and two beta chains, binding one oxygen in the T state nudges not just its own unit of the tetramer, but all four, toward the R state.

Obviously this requires some complicated transmission mechanism, and that remains the subject of research, including this one. Here is a picture: 

Animation of a hemoglobin tetramer shape changes, focusing on one subunit (reddish) and especially its heme group as it binds O2 (teal).

The researchers tried to break down all the motions of the protein chains into two categories- those that change the relative positions of the four subunits, (quaternary), and those that only affect the internal shape of one subunit, (tertiary), without jutting out to affect the others. This was done with computer simulations based on the many known structures of this protein. Hemoglobin was naturally one of the first protein structures ever solved at the atomic level.

What they found was that they could statistically boil down each of these two classes of shape change into one main value (a principal component). Then the question was how these values and detailed motions relate to each other as the major transition goes along from state to the other. One aspect of the internal (tertiary) motions were clearly correlated to the inter-subunit repositioning, and so could be taken to be part of the allosteric mechanism by which one subunit communicates its binding of oxygen to the others. Much of this analysis is unfortunately cloaked on mathematical abstrusities, ensembles, hyperplanes, etc., so I can neither evaluate it nor fully present it.

They decide that they can differentiate between individual "pushing" and "pulling" contacts between subunits, which significantly channel the interaction. The whole story begins with the binding of oxygen, which pushes away protein arms that reach towards the central heme, and also induces that heme to bend from a bent, to a flat, planar shape:

Edge-on view of hemoglobin heme complex, bent without bound O2, and flat when O2 binds, along with a few other local rearrangements.

Table of dynamic contacts within and between hemoglobin subunits that stretch or switch as oxygen binds and the shape changes from R to T. The amino acids are referred to by single letter codes.

A pushing contact ...

 "A clear example for this is the interaction of lysine 82 of beta 1 and lysine 82 of beta 2 we observed: Close to the T-state both side chains are pointing into the solvent. While moving along cQ [the quaternary-only axis], the two chains approach each other and bring both positively charged side chains unfavourably close. The motion along cTew [the tertiary-only axis] relaxes this repulsive interaction by bending the N-terminal ends of the F helices (the helix notation goes back to Watson, Kendrew and Perutz [16]). Experimental studies introduced cross-links between the two lysines [17], [18]. The derived structure was described to be an intermediate between T- and R-state with characteristics of both states but no cooperativity."

 A pulling contact ...

 "These contacts only stay intact if the system moves along cQ [the quaternary-only axis] and cTew [the tertiary-only axis] together, but break if moving in one or the other direction independently. This is the expected behaviour for contacts which must remain intact for the allosteric mechanism to function. Exemplarily, this was observed for phenylalanine 117 of the alpha subunits and argenine 30 of the beta subunits. The hydrogen bond between the carboxylic oxygen of Phe and the side chain of Arg breaks while moving from the T-state towards the off-diagonal intermediate artificial states (see Figure 3), and forms again when approaching the R-state." 

 Which is to say that the contact stays intact during the actual transition, but was broken here in virtual model terms as the experimenters pursued one or the other of their axes (tertiary or quaternary) alone. It is a sign that this contact helps keep things together in a smooth and concerted fashion as the protein starts to change shape on one side.

A more dramatic type of contact is one that switches during the transition. In the alpha-beta interface, (shown below), contact between apartate 94 on the alpha subunit and tryptophan 37 on the beta subunit (in the T state) is broken and the tryptophan 37 switches to contact asparagine 102 on the beta subunit in the R state. These kinds of distinct shifts help stabilize each of the quasi-stable states, T and R, and the researchers identified four such "switching" contacts.

Cartoon of the subunit border area where tryptophan (W) 37 switches from asparagine (N) 102 to aspartate (D) 94 during the oxygen binding transition, among other changes.

It is remarkable that two atoms- O2- can switch the conformation of an enormous complex with an atomic weight of ~64,000. But it is all in a day's work for proteins, whose structures to start with are relatively floppy in the intense jostling of brownian motion. Putting those flops to work by evolving into structures with two stable states, tickle-able by joined-at-the-hip partners.. that is a bit more challenging, but obviously a life-saver given the absurdly inefficient breathing apparatus we are stuck with.

• On the development of capitalism, its inequality, and its morality.
• Misleading information is highly, highly effective.
• "What was the response to your coming out as an atheist? An enormous number of Christians have threatened to do physical harm to me."
• Xerces: Effects of neonicotinoid insecticides on agriculturally important beneficial insects.
• High time to do low-carbon web design.
• Music makes you better.
• A program for restoration of accountability, civil liberties and privacy.
• Rational expectations is pretty much the opposite of what the data shows. "To understand the past and avoid a recurrence of the devastating events we lived through so recently, we need to acknowledge that investors and financial markets do not behave the way rational asset price theory implies."
• But the rich.. yes, they have rational expectations, of privilege.
• Corporate profits at all-time high.
• Non-regulation by the bank regulators. No wonder we are still on FIRE.
• Outsourcing mortgage & foreclosure fraud- the nightmare continues.
• Dumbest retirement policy in the world. And don't forget, Social security is going to screw post-'60 baby boomers as well. The new retirement age is 70.

Horses running wild

Reaping the harvest of an unbalanced ecosystem.

A fascinating review in Science recently laid out the condition of the federal Wild Horses and Burros program. It isn't a pretty sight. The program is severely fenced in by its legal structure. Firstly, the number of wild horses must be kept down to about 30,000, over various Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands centered around Nevada. This limits both competition with ranchers, and prevents disturbing scenes of mass starvation and overpopulation were the herd to expand to its ecological potential. Second, the excess horses can't be killed, but must be put up for adoption or put out to (non-wild) pasture on the BLM dime, in perpetuity.

Map of BLM lands with wild horses.

The BLM at this point is offering prospective owners $500 to adopt their mustangs, but still can't find nearly enough takers. The agency maintains a population of roughly 43,000 horses (males are castrated) in captivity, having removed a total of 200,000 horses from the wild over the last forty years. And it spends about $46 million on its captive horses, a number that is destined to go up, by the analysis of this article, due to increasing reproduction and capture rates from the wild herds.

This is all a little nuts. While it is admirable that US citizens, speaking through their representatives, dislike the prospect of killing horses that we capture from the wild for a wider ecological (and rancher) benefit, this squeamishness is very expensive, and hardly prevents much suffering, assuming that not all the captive pastures are run under ideal conditions, and that humane methods of killing (let's say euthanizing!) the horses exist.

Now the article authors and others (humane society, NRC) call for massive contraceptive intervention on the wild herd, shooting them up with a vaccine that can reduce reproduction when properly applied to domestic horses, though how it would actually be carried out from a distance (say, helicopters) is not at all clear. Again, another enormous commitment in perpetuity to manage a population that lacks the key element needed for natural balance: an appropriate predator.

Where is the wolf? Extirpated in Nevada. Where are the cougars? In the mountains, and not very interested in hunting horses. They are also managed closely and have their paws full dealing with an enormous population of deer. Where are the cheetas? Back in Africa.  Where are the bears? Mostly extirpated. So it is either us or disease & starvation that is going to limit the wild horse population.

It brings to mind the question of why horses died out in the Americas in the first place. We really have no good explation. After evolving here for tens of millions of years, the horse left for good around 12,000 years ago, along with the rest of the American megafauna. One gets the distinct impression that they were hunted to extinction by our less-squeamish ancestors, but it is rather hard to square such a theory with the horse's subsequent success across Asia.

We have no problem killing untold millions of other animals- cows, sheep, chickens- to eat and wear, and even manage to euthanize our pets. Why not horses? We seem under the spell of an archetype here- of the wild, born-to-be-free animal totem of a world that is long gone. I for one would be all for restoring a bit of that world in the form of predators to make up a more balanced ecosystem. We need more wolves. But if we don't want wolves on the prowl through the Western ranges, we need to step up and do the job ourselves, rather than telling a bureaucracy to do the impractical or impossible, to hide the problem in far-off corrals and pastures.

• Homo economicus & Homo politicus ... are we purely competitive (and fearful), or are we other things as well?
• Christianity and its cults. Or is the whole thing a cult?
• Atheist gunned down.
• Does religion make people depressed?
• Reason really doesn't work well, either.
• Median household makes less today than it did in 1989, in real terms.
• Status quo bias breeds acceptance of unacceptable conditions.
• Economic quote of the week, from Martin Wolf;

"So what happened on October 10 [2008]? The finance ministers and central bank governors of the Group of Seven leading high-income countries, meeting in Washington, declared that they would “take decisive action and use all available tools to support systemically important financial institutions and prevent their failure” (my emphasis). The core global financial system became the ward of the states. The idea that this was a private system was revealed to be an illusion. Taxpayers woke up to discover that bankers were exceptionally highly paid and out-of-control civil servants."

• And, from Edward McClelland:

"Between 1970 and today, the share of the nation’s income that went to the middle class – households earning two-thirds to double the national median – fell from 62 percent to 45 percent."

State and Firm: the transition from predation

As governments become more democratic and accountable, do workplaces?

The classic interpretation of the state is that of gradual transition (hopefully progress!) from the Hobbesian war of all against all, to organized banditry, to stationary banditry, to feudalism & aristocracy, and ultimately, by degrees, to increasing regard and accommodation to the populous subjects of the state, to the point where in a democracy, the ruled are, and control, the rulers for the broadest interest of all. A nice story, though the current rule by Wall Street looks like a step backwards in some respects. Corruption serves as another method of predation, more or less organized, available to individuals and state organizations at most levels of the progression.

The firm could be viewed similarly, coming from a Marxist perspective (thanks to Bill Mitchell for a couple of blogs on the topic). As feudalism wore down, its forms of control split between the public state and private capitalism. A transitional example of the latter was the plantation economy of the American South. Capitalists need to exploit labor, as the feudal lords exploited their serfs and other subjects. How is this done, other than through management? Management wears the two faces of, on the one hand, guiding and facilitating the work of the firm, putatively something salable on the open market, and thus of positive social value both to customers and to the workers who create it (assuming they are voluntarily employed). The other face is that of guardian of the interests of capital, extracting as much surplus value as possible from the workers, and paying as little as possible. Making use of the labor market, such as it is, and the political system, and any other tools, including in the not too distant past, physical violence, to keep labor powerless, subservient, and poor. Additionally, other resources than labor are  treated similarly. Public goods are expropriated or destroyed for private profit, patents poached, public officials corrupted, public institutions coopted, and media blanketed with disinformation, for any possible advantage.

My question is whether the predation of the firm has replicated the more or less progressive trajectory of the state, or whether progress in that relationship has stagnated over recent decades. For the state, the world has been swept by democracy. Even the Arab world has caught wind of this trend, though it is ending in tears in some precincts. Civil rights have expanded, to ethnic minority populations, to women, and to sexual and other minorities. Even with the sclerosis and backsliding we see in the US political system, with the top-heavy security state and war establishment, the people, in their media-addled state, are in control when they want to be.

To the original question, one would have to say, no. Death is no longer a routine part of predatory capitalism- workplaces have become safer for most workers. But the economic divide between workers and those they work for has grown enormously, which shows heightened predation over the last few decades. All labor productivity gains have gone to capital, and none to labor. Peonage has made a comeback in the form of predatory lending. This is hard to defend on any rational or moral basis, and one has to conclude that, through the many tools of politics, media, corporate governance, and ideology, capital has grown more predatory rather than less, contrary to the trend of lower predation by the public state.

Ironically, the ideologues of the capital have used the language of civil rights, equal play, and freedom from the evil public predatory state to defend the capacity of capital and employers to predate on workers. The entrepreneur is celebrated as the free spirit who brings immeasurable value to the masses, and whose freedom to organize must not be impinged. Yet the worker's freedom to organize and create a counter-capital power structure that, among other things, raises pay - that is a different story! Collusion in the boardroom, to pay each other in crony capitalist terms and evade accountability ... no problem there. But collusion among the cubicles is not to be tolerated. The irony continues as labor gets paid less, and can buy less, leading to a seizure of the macro-economic cycle that the entrepreneur was supposed to be leading by his miraculous "supply-side" efforts. Which only serves to unmask the whole exercise as one of simple greed by the top end of town.

Of course the Marxist question is whether this whole setup was fair in the first place. Does the mere possession of money entitle a person to the perpetual future flow of more money, via rents and profit streams? Is this truly consistent with human values and just deserts? Back when capital was scarce, this practice / ideology may have made more sense. But today, when capital is not at all scarce, (as shown by the level of interest rates), the economic and political machinations required to keep & even grow power in the hands of capital appear to be an unseemly anachronism, counter to the public interest.

But putting aside the deservedness of the capitalist and the managerial class, and assuming that private firms do work that serves the public interest, (or could be appropriately regulated to do so), perhaps a more fundamental question is on the labor side. How many workers need the specter of poverty, low-wage jobs, and social stigma to be lashed to work? Could our society function if everyone who works was paid decently by their employer, and not forced to collect extra money from the government to relieve their employer of the burden? Could our society function with public service jobs offered to everyone wanting to work at a decent floor wage, and with a lower maintenance payment to those unable to meet even a basic work standard? Could private employers function having to pay more for labor? Would having fewer fast food establishments and other services, and higher food prices be an acceptable price for having everyone live in dignity? Would the number forsaking the private workforce for public service jobs exceed the number that has been involuntarily thrown out of work by the business cycle? And if so, would that be a bad thing?

Most people want to work. They want to be useful and not on any dole. But the current system, controlled for the interests of capital, (and also by the blind vagaries of the free market, leading to highly damaging booms and busts), generates a large army of unemployed and underemployed. Which in turn leads to immediate waste and disgruntlement, and long-term generational dysfunction. We can build a better system, and with a modicum of management in the public interest, which our government has proven itself capable of in the past, we can create not only a far more compassionate country, but one with higher prosperity and economic well-being for the vast majority of citizens.

• Rich people in a democracy.. the use of idiot populism.
• Stiglitz chimes in- inequality is engineered, and poisonous.
• Just who gets to collude / organize in the modern economy?
• Poverty is still very high.
• Brainwashing and Christianity. Sort of a system of terror. Especially in Texas.
• Hell:  the psychology is way too strong to just do away with it.
• Carbon and business as usual- not a happy future.
• Let's get rid of coal.
• Renewables are still approaching parity.
• The Taliban is now using clear-and-hold.
• Those selfless non-prosecutors, non-regulators at the SEC. And derelict reporters into the bargain. And why isn't the NSA snooping at the real evil-doers?
• We still need that Tobin tax.
• Subprime is right back in the saddle.
• Chemical corruption in the US.
• Economic quote of the week, from Paul Krugman: 

"So what can be done? For the moment, the kind of transformation that took place under the New Deal — a transformation that created a middle-class society, not just through government programs, but by greatly increasing workers’ bargaining power — seems politically out of reach. But that doesn’t mean we should give up on smaller steps, initiatives that do at least a bit to level the playing field..., for example,... universal prekindergarten education, paid for with a small tax surcharge on those with incomes over $500,000. ... For extreme inequality is still on the rise — and it’s poisoning our society."

• Economic graph of the week, showing the trillions of output and income (roughly 5 to 10 trillion at current count) that have been stolen / lost due to the economic debacle caused by our leading financial institutions, including derelict regulatory officers and instutions. All to keep the casino going for the top end.

Bach: a book

Review of Eric Siblin's "The Cello Suites"

This is a good book, a little over-written, and a little self-indulgent. Siblin presents parallel portraits of Johann Sebastian Bach, composer of his six famous cello suites, and Pablo Cassals, who resurrected them into the top-drawer recital pieces they remain today.

It is extremely interesting, and probably the material on Cassals was added to fill out the void that is our knowledge of Bach's personal life. But to me it seemed a strongly tragic story, with Bach unrecognized as a great composer in his lifetime, and his wife dying in paupery. How could this be? Now, Bach is all the rage, with full releases of his hundreds of cantatas, and thorough scholarship of his over one thousand-work catalog. But in his day, GF Handel couldn't be bothered to visit Bach even when passing through a town 25 kilometers away. And those famous suites where pretty much unknown for almost two hundred years after being written.

It makes you wonder whether disco is going to take the world by storm in some future epoch. Music goes in and out of fashion, and in Bach's time, his music was very much going out of fashion, which was travelling from sacred polyphony to popular opera and homophonic song (in the early 1700's). He was as fusty in his musical tastes as in his politics, religion, and dress. But the music, ah! Bach also didn't get around much. After visiting the Hamburg area in his youth, he spent his whole life in his homeland of Saxony. Having 20 children probably didn't leave much time for travel.

Speaking of which, the notorious genetics of the Bach family are a clear indication of eugenics (or at least assortative mating) at work. That musical talent is heritable seems as clear as the heritability of intelligence, height, and all sorts of other behavioral and physical traits. Whether we have the philosophical or moral foundation to even want to put such principles into practice is a separate question, but the potential is obvious enough.

Bach is, moreover, characteristic of great composers and great periods of composition in that he was paid more or less by the yard. Like the great broadway composers, (Richard Rodgers comes to mind), or the Motown era, it was simply expected, in the competitive system of the day, to crank out music continously, on demand. And the fascinating thing is that some composers rise remarkably to such conditions.

And, heartbreakingly enough, some unknown portion of Bach's work is lost. Siblin tells stories of Bach manuscripts found used for wrapping paper and for potting plants. His son C. P. E. Bach was the most filial and successful, but even his collection of his father's manuscripts was sold off under the auction hammer in 1788.

What makes music transcend its time? Innate quality is the first ingredient. But someone has to recognize it and perform it, which can demand going against fashion. The appreciation of other musicians finally turned the situation around for Bach's legacy. He was loved and appreciated by Beethoven and Mozart, but only really popularized by Felix Mendelssohn, who, in 1829, properly put on and publicized Bach's St. Matthew Passion.

Ever since, we have been treated to a flowing bach of music that seems as endless as it is astounding.

• More on labor and labor day.
  
• The carbon tax really works.
• A carbon tax that gives Greg Mankiw a big tax cut, but is regressive overall.
• The strength of climate heating brainwashing may be weakening. But only as long as the tax system can be made more regressive!
• A general climate plan.
• Where is the deterrence on white collar crime?
• Corrupt protection racket ... on the internet.
• Some cognitive problems in Christianity.
• The Taliban and women, continued.
• Hooray for modernity. And rationalism.
• Another problem with guns: forest fires.
• The absurdity of the Wall Street Journal. Do they even try to make sense anymore?
• A little finance is good. A lot is very bad.
• Economic quote of the week, on the productivity of finance, management, and capitalism in general, from Bill Mitchell:

"So the ideological push to make capitalism appear to be fair led to the development of marginal productivity theory. Thus, the theory became that people are paid according to their contribution to production. That was then represented as a fair system and was used politically to negate the claims that workers were being exploited."

Work is a fundamental value

What happened to family values, the work ethic, and bootstrap-pulling?

Judging by the actions of the current Republican class in congress, it is OK for 10 to 20 million Americans to loaf around, not doing anything productive. They and their families can decline into social disfunction and all the other ills associated with poverty. They can lose their skills and indeed desire for work. That is OK.

Sure, they should all help themselves, but with far fewer jobs than unemployed, and fewer decent jobs than poverty-level ones among those, it is a game of musical chairs with more than one chair missing. Sure, they should all start their own businesses, cleaning yachts or something, but the rich are not really in a spending mood. The rich (or other consumers) would have to spend more overall in order for this kind of entrepreneurial spirit to result in a net increase in jobs and higher economic activity. But they are still saving, and indeed complain that interest rates are too low, impeding their saving plans.

One wonders what ethical planet the Republicans, conservatives, and other chamber of commerce types are on. Did the imperatives of class war somehow over-rule their platitudes about hard work and family values? Has maintaining a vast reserve army of the unemployed, with all the employer power that represents, become more important than promoting a middle class with universal values of fair play, decent pay, and stable communities? It looks that way from here.

Unfortunately, with democracy in America (if not governance entirely) temporarily suspended in the interest of the moneyed interests, one can only propose better policies in an abstract, long-game sort of way. And the two we need are: a living minimum wage, and a guarantee of a job for everyone who wants to work. The two policies combine forces by paying a decent living salary to any citizen who wants work, to work for public projects and needs of which we have no shortage. Then private employers can bid on top of that to get the workers they need, if they have worthwhile work to do.

As we learned in the Great Depression, work is a fundamental value. Everyone needs to feel useful and do something useful. No one wants a handout when they could be helping others, earning their way, and supporting their family. The depression was not only economically, but psychologically devastating, with the realization that, due to some technical problems with the monetary and banking systems, a quarter of the population was suddenly denied work and thrown into poverty. The fundamental point and nature of the economy was put in question.

The last century also showed that no pure system, whether communist or free market, works sustainably by itself. We need elements of both for a healthy economy and culture. We need the freedoms and competitiveness of the private market system. And we also need intelligent policy and legal controls over market systems to make them work effectively, as well as robust safety nets that insure us all from their recurrent, inevitable failures on small and large scales.

On this labor day, it is time to realize that we in the US are rich enough to use all our labor at all times, out of both self-interested as well as compassionate motives.

• Low wages don't happen naturally.
• The new, bleak workscape.
• The politics of destruction, continued...
• Remember, in a recession/depression, fiscal spending is the only way to do it.
• Lying as a condition of business employment. And a justice system that curries to lying businesses. Who knew!?
• Blacks have made few significant economic gains in 50 years.
• There are still plenty of mysteries in genetics and development.
• FBI negligence: was a mega-economic crisis a fair price to pay for less terrorism?
• Music is good for us.. no kidding!
• Economic quotes of the week, from J.D. Alt: 

"The War Bonds and the Revenue Act creating the personal income tax, then, were specifically created not for the purpose of “collecting” money so the government could have it to spend—but rather for the purpose of destroying money so the government could then issue and spend even more dollars without feeding an uncontrolled inflationary spiral."

• .. and from Bill Mitchell on the class war, quoting Heidi Moore on a simple point about food stamps, welfare, earned income tax credits, and the like:

"The article points out that because of the appalling remuneration of low paid workers in the US, the provision of safety nets in the form of food stamps etc, means: '… that the government is paying to subsidize company profits: as businesses pay a minimum or near-minimum wage, their workers are forced to turn to government programs to make ends meet.'"

• Bonus note from Pakistan:

"In an effort to help clear Pakistan's clogged courtrooms, Pakistani officials have created a mobile court that will mediate small civil cases, minor criminal cases, and juvenile cases across the country (Reuters).  There are about 1.4 million cases pending in Pakistan and frustration over decades-long cases as led some litigants to turn to tribal jirgas instead.  While these councils offer instant decisions, sentences can include being buried alive, gang-raped, or stoned to death.  Court officials are hoping their mobile justice system, which launched on Tuesday, can offer an alternative.  The mobile court heard 29 cases in Peshawar during its first day in action and the government hopes to launch 11 more buses by the end of the year."

Empiricism: good for tiny and unimportant things!

Baseball succumbs to the video replay.

One attitude that intrigues me in discussion with defenders of religion is their appreciation of logic and science. They are often effusive about its value and relevance to all kinds of practical and mundane things. But when it comes to the so-called "big questions" and super-important topics, well, then intuition and whatever-I-feel-in-my-gut rules the day.

It is as if the enlightenment and multiple scientific revolutions came and went, in one ear and out the other. As if humans hadn't learned they are fallible, and do not intuitively come up with all the right answers about the structure of reality, automatically, by sheer inspiration. As if they still had an imaginary friend.

This all came to mind again when I read that baseball is finally giving in to the instant replay. Spectators at home watching their Tivo'd HDTV games can see all the bad officiating in excruciating detail, and the league can no longer hide behind a best effort / intuitive model of officiating. They are forced to deal with the actual truth, which may not come from the eyes of umpires, but more reliably from the unblinking camera. Like countless areas of science, sports is (reluctantly) transformed by instruments that improve on our natural endowments, and help us see new things, or the familar in new ways, with greater accuracy.

Similar progress is afoot in law, where the reliability of eye-witness testimony has over the recent decades come to be recognized as among the worst evidence, while technological marvels like DNA identification provide a whole new level of accuracy.

So, what about religion, the exemplary province still ruled by intuition? By coincidence, Steven Pinker wrote a strong plea in TNR recently for a truce between science and the humanities, including religion, to cooperate rather than hiding in mutual ignorance, hurling meaningless language such as "scientism". His point was not only that science has had important humanistic underpinnings and effects over the last several centuries, but that those humanities most vexed by "scientism", such as postmodernist philosophy and theology, have not had a lot of accomplishment to crow about themselves. They had better learn from other fields and take what is useful, rather than take obscurantist potshots.

In return, it is obvious that science and scientists need to be careful about what they have expertise in, and what values they and the humanities respectively bring to the table. But one important point here is that, under the cover of "hard" sciences and objectivity, science has made great strides in recognizing human cognitive limitations, both explicitly in the fields of psychology, and implicitly in the other sciences, whose whole modus operandi is built around the recognition of human weaknesses, which require constant vigilance, by open argument between competitively motivated scholars, by mathematical formulations where possible, by the discouting of authority, by careful and public documentation, and, most notoriously of all, by empirical experiment.

Have enough experiments been done to say whether prayers work? Have enough experiments been done to say whether god saves its chosen people, favors one team over another, or one nation, or one religion? Have enough experiments been done to indicate that religion has a deep psychological basis that belie its florid claims to objective truth?

Yes. We know all these things, and much more. For those viewing at home, the primary property of god is its "hidden-ness". For those rewinding and watching in depth and slow-motion, another primary property is the abundant anthropomorphic projections and wishes (and fears) attached to "Him". It is quite clear where all this comes from, and it isn't from telescopic observation.

Connected with this, we also know that we are fundamentally alone. While there may (or may not) be other intelligent beings in the universe, we know already that they won't be genetically or cognitively related to us, and will be so distant as to be fundamentally cut off from interacting with us. There is no one else to turn to.

Part of being existentially alone is having no outer standard of morals or other subjective values. We answer to no god or other being, we go to no Valhalla after death. Part of what we have learned is that for all the objective reality out there, the values and desires we have are our own, part of our subjective (and biological) makeup, in a constant dance with the wisdom (and desires) of those around us, and with those who have gone before and cultured our way through the world. This is the one place where intuitions really do rule supreme, since they make up our values by necessity ... there is nothing else to go by.

One can sense the discomfort of those yearning for something more certain to hang on to- a father totem to tell them what to think and how to feel. But, checking the instant replay, god is still dead and gone ... the movements of theology, postmodernsim, religious "discernment", and post-60's backlash are made up of people working out their own issues, groping in the dark without help from above. A key tipoff is their moralism. What is real or not is secondary to whether their communities live in a properly patriarchial moral order agreeable to them.

Incidentally, Steven Pinker discusses the fascinating issue of "explaining away", which is a common fear coming from the humanities. If we understand some interesting topic in a fully worked-out reductionistic sense, does that rob us of some aesthetic appreciation, of some of our humanity? Does music theory kill one's appreciation for Bach? Does knowing molecular biology kill one's appreciation for biology, or does instant replay destroy our appreciation for baseball? I don't think so.

What empiricism and science in general do "explain away" are ... bad explanations. There may be a certain charm in thinking that hurricanes are caused by immorality, birth defects by sins in a past life, that prophets received divine "revelations", or that god forms us in "His" image, (take note, females!), but we have to make do without such tales when we learn more about how things actually work. If you value "inspired" scriptures, mystical "forces", and folk theories about all and sundry, then yes, we lose something by this rationalistic, reductionistic, remorseless instant-replay process of enlightenement. And, frankly, good riddance.

• "Intellectually unsubtle"!, fumes Russ Douthat. Of all people.
• God still hanging around in some very small council chambers.
• Dawkins: evil, or just right?
• Why are attitudes about science shifting.. or are they?
• At least some fields (cougheconomics) could use another dose of empiricism.
• Malthus and modernity. Why does population outrun development in some countries, not others?
• Fannie and Freddie should be made entirely state run, not destroyed.
• The brotherhood's gamble.
• When will Egypt get a competent civilian government?
• Republicans... still the party sort of opposed to governing.
• On the values of leadership.
• We have to take nuclear seriously. After we get that carbon tax, of course.

Not even feudal

The many pieces of the Pakistan puzzle. Review of "Pakistan: A hard country", by Anatol Lieven

The good news is that Pakistan is quite a stable country, in the opinion of the author, a King's College, London scholar with who has travelled and interviewed extensively all over Pakistan (excepting where he would be killed, in the vicinity of Waziristan!). The bad news is that much of this stability is due to the most backward elements of its society- the immovable tribalism, corruption, poly-theism, and divisiveness of its politics, which prevent any single revolutionary movement, Islamist or otherwise, from sweeping the country or breaking it apart. And the one thing all Pakistanis agree on? That they hate the U.S. and India.

It is an excellent book, delving into more details than I thought possible for a Western author. Each province is discussed in some detail, each party explained, and the obscure workings of the military and graft system untangled, at least slightly. He commends the hard-working nature of Pakistan's politicians, who have to juggle an unending stream of favors, bribes, nepotism, and more or less formal militias and street fighting, leaving little time (or desire) for grand visions, party ideology, or good government technocracy.

But let's back up a little. Pakistan was founded (67 years ago this week) from the dissolution of British rule over India, in Britain's dramatically weakened state after world war 2. The Muslims of India knew they would never get to rule in a future Indian democracy, (despite their history of presumably glorious Mughal rule), and, among many other things, asked for a legally stipulated 50% share of all government positions. Well, that was typical ... and hardly realistic, so what started as an abstraction, threat, and bargaining chip - partition- turned into a slapdash reality, as a boundary commission composed of Cyril Radcliffe and colleagues (who knew nothing of the area) took a month to draw a border, known as the Radcliffe line. Mixed communities on both sides were quickly ethnically cleansed, and what was a roughly 20% Hindu population in the future Pakistan became less than 1%. Hundreds of thousands died, and many millions fled to their newly declared religio-ethnic homelands.

While the haste of line-drawing was certainly a defect, one has to say that the competing model taking place in Israel/Palestine, where a line is never ever drawn, is hardly better. But it was really the implementation that failed- the British cut and ran within two months, and virtually no one on either side was prepared to take over their new nations, let alone manage (i.e. police) the gradual disentanglement of centuries of mixed living. Who was more at fault? Well, India still has roughly as many Muslims as Pakistan does, at about 13% of its population, so just going by the numbers, the ethnic bias of the Muslim side seems distinctly stronger. After partition, Pakistan proceeded to start three wars against India, each of which it lost. It also lost its co-religionists in Bangladesh who originally constituted "East Pakistan", and who were regarded as distinctly inferior by their Western brothers. Nor was Pakistan ever taken seriously by the Islamic world at large as its leading nation and beacon, as it had hoped.

A miscellaneous picture from contemporary Pakistan. Breakfast on the train, by Steve McCurry.

So Pakistan arose in tumult, wedged between two highly artificial boundary lines, and while more or less purely Islamic, still contains multitudes, including all possible sects of Islam. The refugees from India formed a special community and party in Karachi, founded on their special sacrifice for Islam (the Muhajirs), which again, the other communities are not terribly impressed with. The Punjabi farmers constitute the heart and majority of Pakistanis, ringed around by India on one side, and their tribal cousins the Sindis to the east and south, the Pashtuns to the north, and the even more tribal Balochs to the far east on the border with Iran. Each community is of course riven itself with various political lineages and ethnic allegiances. Indeed, the only national and highly functioning "tribe" of sorts is the army, which preserves a prim and disciplined, but not always intellectually penetrating, legacy from the British and more recently its U.S. relationships.

For example, the Pakistanis routinely blame the US for "forgetting" about them and about Afghanistan, after the Soviets were driven out. But we didn't live next door. Pakistan did, and its military establishment and ISI kept funneling money and arms into the Afghan civil war, and thereafter supporting the Taliban. Lieven discusses in detail how the ISI saw the unrest and strife in Afghanistan as a model for what Pakistan could also do to Kashmir. Promoting development in Afghanistan doesn't seem to have crossed anyone's mind in Pakistan.

Two other critical sources of fracture are, as Lieven portrays it, language and the judicial system. The official language is Urdu, which is largely Hindi written in an Arabic-like (via Persion) script. It is used by only a minority of the population, and what is more, is frowned upon by the true elites who speak English. Most of the population speak one of the many local languages- Punjabi, Sindi, Pashto, Hindko, etc.

Yet the justice system runs on English, due to its British precedents and structure (save for trial by jury, which was left out of the bequest, oddly enough!). So the vast majority of the population can not speak the language of their own justice system, let alone write it (indeed, literacy overall in any language is about 57%). And most of the functionaries who must operate in English do so tenuously. Combined with pervasive and flagrant corruption, this means that cases can grind on, Kafka-esque, for decades, amid misunderstandings and hidden influences. This means in turn that both officialdom and private citizens take matters into their own hands as a matter of course, using "encounter killings" on the part of the police, and blood feuds, kidnapping, general violence and riots by the latter.

An informant in Swat tells Lieven: "A khan politician would use his gunmen to seize some poor farmer's land and his political connections to stop the administration doing anything about it. Then he would say to the farmer, 'Sure, take me to court. You will pay everything you have in bribes, you will wait thirty years for a verdict, and the verdict will still be for me. So what are you going to do about it?' Well, when the TNSM [local Taliban branch] came up that farmer could do something about it. He joined them."

It also means that the alternative systems of justice offered by the Taliban, advertised as Sharia, (though typically owing as much to the tribal code of pashtunwali), is for all its flaws, extremely popular with Pakistanis in Pashtun areas and beyond, mostly because of its great rapidity and effectiveness. Crime, drugs, and "licentiousness" can be cleaned up virtually overnight. Yet upon closer inspection, the beneficiaries grow a little less enamored of the Taliban's justice, bought as it is at the price of totalitarian terror, and capricious, often downright un-Islamic, barbarity.

Indeed, the whole sense of justice is slightly different than Westerners might imagine. Lieven mentions the concept of honor or reputation (izzat), prevalent not just in tribal areas, but all over Pakistan, indeed all over southwest Asia: "Walsh speaks of izzat as an individual matter, but it is equally important to famillies, extended families, and clans. Indeed, most crimes committed in defense of izzat (and for that matter, most crimes in general) are collective crimes, as other family members join in to help or avenge their injured kinsmen in battle, to threaten witnesses, to bribe policemen and judges, or at the very least to purjure themselves in court giving evidence on behalf of relatives. This is not seen as immoral, or even in a deeper sense illegal. On the contrary, it takes place in accordance with an overriding moral imperative and ancient moral 'law', that of loyalty to kin."

The larger political system is likewise fractured, with overlaid westernized, feudal, and tribal institutions. The upper levels of government operate ostensibly on a western model, with prime minister, president, parliament, etc. But scratch the surface, and the substrate looks much more like a tribal system. The main parties are basically hereditary fiefdoms. For instance, the PPP of the Bhuttos are waiting for Benazir Bhutto's son to come of age to take over from the lackluster husband Asif Zardari. Their program has virtually nothing to do with ideology or approach to governance, but rather with patronage down a chain of smaller office holders to the local big-man system that runs most of Pakistan. Rural landholders are commonly referred to as the "feudals", but I think that oversells their powers of organization and governance. There are many tribal elements involved, and not just in the explicitly tribal areas.

The fuel of this system at all levels is patronage, graft, deceit, and corruption, whereby taxes are forgiven and neglected, jobs handed out, police actions directed for polical ends, and contracts let for projects that are never built. This leads to a dynamic where each party can only be in power briefly, since its empty popular campaign promises never are or can be fulfilled, nor enough graft generated to satisfy all adherents, leading to a cycle of disappointment and party-switching, not to mention governing mediocrity.

The author, like most observers, is starkly judgemental and anxious to see Pakistan modernize. But what would that mean? As people, we are all competitive, and Pakistanis are clearly prize specimens of competitive spirit, accessorized with a variety of narcissistic delusions, from the superiority (indeed the truth) of Islam on down to Pakistan's leading role in the Ulema, their superiority over India, obsessions with tribal honor and patriarchy, their especially toxic feeling of superiority over Afghanistan, and in general the various successes they would have but for the evil conspiracies of the US.

The problem is, delusions aside, that this competition is mostly zero-sum. One political party wins so that it can take the jobs away from the other party and give them to its incompetent hacks. The military promotes the perpetual war with Eastasia so that it can keep eating the lion's share of the budget, not to mention billions in aid from the US. But the society at large does not benefit. Tribal competition may be great for genetic evolution, killing the unfit and distributing spoils to the most ferocious and clever. But it does not (on any acceptable time scale!) generate cultural or economic development. That only happens when human competitiveness is channeled into constructive pursuits, the capitalist system being a prime exemplar, and professional governance another. The hidden hand is fueled by human competitiveness and existential necessity just as surely as are the most bitter tribal feud. But it creates far more wealth and public good (when properly regulated!). Pakistan's per-capita GDP ranks 141 in the world, out of 187 countries, significantly behind India, among many, many others. Much is due to complete lack of population control, but that is only one facet of Pakistan's deep failures of civil and institutional development.

What to do? From the US perspective, my prescription would be for the US to end monetary aid to Pakistan, or at least put it on the same footing, per capita, as our aid to India, which would amount to the same thing. The stunning process by which, after many decades of alliance, we are thoroughly and universally detested in Pakistan, points to very deep psychological issues which money does not help, within a relationship which could be called abusive. Anyhow, what Pakistan needs from us and from the West generally is not money, let alone aid to its military, but content- intellectual, managerial, governmental, institutional, philosophical. We should be on the friendliest possible terms on all those fronts, but not in ways that blackmail us into giving them money for their efforts (or lack thereof) towards being a basically civilized state. The cold war is long over, and Afghanistan has far more urgent need for our aid, for, among other things, defending itself against Pakistan. We have shown that we can do without military transport through Pakistan. China's relationship with Pakistan is far from being a threat to our interests either. Just as our process of leaving Afghanistan promises to ease a great deal of bitterness and tension there, disentangling our relationship with Pakistan would do likewise, benefiting both countries.

An interviewee in the Mohmand agency on the Afghan border talks about his brother: "He joined the Taleban because he believes in Islam, and because the Americans attacked Afghanistan without cause. Afghanistan is an occupied country like Kashmir. He and other Taleban do not want to fight the Pakistani army, but they have no choice because the army is attacking them on the orders of America. The Taleban would like to make an agreement with the government here so that they can go and fight in Afghanistan. But America doesn't allow the government to do that. It wants war in Pakistan so that Muslim will kill Muslim."

• Another typical, duplicitous day with India: "On Tuesday, Salman Khurshid, India's Minister of External Affairs, told reporters that there was a sense of shock in New Delhi over the 'ceasefire violations by Pakistan,' and a spokesman for the ministry confirmed that the tensions in Kashmir would delay secretary-level talks between the two nuclear-armed neighbors (Dawn).  In his statement, the spokesman for the ministry said, 'For peaceful dialogue to proceed we need an environment free of violence and terror. And certainly what has happened last week doesn't fit into that.'"
• Is Pakistan getting serious about its internal terrorism?
• Egypt looks headed back down a similar path as Pakistan, as a militariocracy.
• A little commentary from a British onlooker.
• Another zero-sum activity that gives us nothing.. day trading.
• How it works in Pakistan-on-the-Mersey.
• Studies in US corruption.
• Indeed, our mortgage crisis is one long litany of unprosecuted criminality and corruption.
• Conventional, even elite, wisdom isn't very good. Everyone, please think for yourselves!
• Not only is the 401K "system" off-loading risk from employers to financially unskilled workers, and allows employers the a la carte option of zero cost for providing a "retirement benefit", but the plans are also structured to fleece employees. Great job, congress!
• Tempest over the IMF & Rogoff.
• Robert Bellah as closet theologian and evangelist.
• Religion and intelligence.. hmmmm.
• Liberals unclear on the science concept.
• On the psychology of evolution. Why we don't believe in it. I can add one more facet of likely disbelief. Humans are very groupish and tribal. We are attuned to very small gradations of difference between ourselves and others.. even non-existent differences cooked up in ethnic fantasies. This is one reason why some Americans are called African-American as a matter of course, while virtually none are called German-American or Russian-American. So the idea that a monkey is our "uncle", as it were, if many times removed, is instinctively disturbing, unless we have, as the article notes, adopted a very abstract and long-range view of time and change in biology.
• Economic quotes of the week, from Bill Mitchell:

"The deficit should be whatever is required in each period to ensure that effective demand is at a level that is consistent with achieving potential output – that is, full employment. That might require a continuous sequence of deficits forever. Most likely given the historical behaviour of the external sector and private domestic sectors in most nations."

• And.. from Bill Black:

"Given the fact that the CEOs of large fraudulent lenders are criminally liable for tens or even hundreds of thousands of acts of mortgage fraud we should be seeing our prisons overrun with elite white-collar criminals.  Instead, the DOJ has no convictions of the elite bankers who led the control frauds that caused the crisis."

The god that failed

The boys of 1945, and degrees of humanity.

I don't know what people get out of horror films, but I do know what we get out of the holocaust literature. A sickening sense of moral depravity, of every value turned upside down, and of a world crying out for justice. There is also a sense of absolute Darwinism at its most brutal, both in the genocidal tribalism of a Germany gone mad, and in the grinding imperative to stay alive for every one of the exceeding few who survived.

This is occasioned by reading Martin Gilbert's "the Boys", about one remnant of Polish Jewry liberated from the concentration camps at the end of world war 2 and sent to England for recuperation. 732 children in their mid-teens, more or less, mostly boys, had undergone this harrowing journey, losing everything and everyone, and coming out through various strokes of luck and backbreaking labor into a world which generally went on without much ado, back into its normal grooves and preoccupations.

The outstanding part of the book is the first half, where the survivors tell their tales, frequently after decades of silence during which they were busy likewise getting on with their lives. Gilbert solicited their stories, and we can be thankful that many obliged, with great care and detail. They cover the nature of life in Poland before the war, which was a mixed bag of strong antisemitism in some communities, and unprejudiced positive coexistence up until the German occupation in relatively few others. Then of course the descent into hell. The restrictions, the dehumanization, the ghettos, the shipping to and fro, the labor camps, the starvation, the lice, the gas chambers.

"A few days after the deportation from Kozienice, the Jews working at Szyczki were given permission by their Polish overseer to conduct the Kol Nidrei even service, with which Yom Kippur - the day of atonement- begins. 'As a result', Moneik Goldberg recalled, 'some people figured that nothing would happen if they didn't report to work the next day. I was still observant at the time and wanted to stay in. There was a man, Moishe Zowoliner, whom my father had known very well and he had written him to ask him to look after me. He made me go to work that morning. When we returned to the barracks in the evening the SS from Radom were there. We were all marched to a clearing in the forest nearby. Those who had stayed in were already there. They had dug a ditch and upon our arrival they were all massacred, and we were ordered to fill the ditch with dirt. That was the first massacre I witnessed - on Yom Kippur 1942. I was fourteen years old.'"

Few of the survivors in this group remain religious. They are very much Jewish, but god for them seems to have pretty much failed as a concept. One typical query, from Meir Sosnowicz, now Michael Novice:

"There was another, very important question: 'Where was God?' I prayed to Him to redeem us. I acknowledged His presence. I looked for the miracles of redemption which we had learned about during our Bible studies at home and at school: the Exodus from Egypt, the story of Korah, who was punished immediately for his sins. The sins of Pharaoh seemed much less than the sins of the Germans and their cohorts. How long could God allow these obscenities to continue? Where was He? The redemption seemed a long time coming. Would it ever come? The question reminded me, in a very small way, of when, as a child, I hurt myself, and my mother was not around, it seemed for ever until she came. Where was my mother? I was confused. Today we say that God hid himself, turned his face from us, answered 'NO' to our request. I know that to this day I can not understand what He had in mind, to allow all this to happen for so long a time and to so many good and innocent people."

And do they regard religion good in a more general sense, spurring good morals and humanity?

"'While my behavior towards individual Germans and Poles is very forgiving,' Jack Rubinfeld wrote, 'I am fully aware of the enthusiastic participation by the majority of Germans, Poles, and Ukrainians in the hatred and gross mistreatment of the Jews. As a group, I have not forgiven them. For me, the main responsibility lies within the Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant clergy and churches, that planted and nourished the seeds of this hatred. After so many generations of calculated cultivation, it became part of their genes or cultural landscape. Unfortunately for the believers, even hell is an absolute truth.'"

One of the additionally shocking aspects of the story was that after their liberation, many of the victims went back to Poland to their erstwhile homes. They were met there with killing squads, now of the native inhabitants, who perhaps were so full of the German ideology, perhaps so unwilling to face their own guilt and possible loss of ecnomic advantage, that they did their best to bring that final solution to a grim conclusion. Several of the boys describe hair-raising escapes at this time, which finally sent them on their way to England, Israel, and the US as totally, utterly bereft refugees.

For Poland now has a Jewish community of roughly 20,000, less than one percent of the original number. And it is interesting to reflect what a long and strong history Jews had in Poland. For over five centuries, it was a golden place, a Mecca(!) for Jews being driven out of Western Europe and Russia. Indeed at one time, Jews in Poland consituted the majority of all Jews world-wide. It is astonishing to think about.

It gives some perspective to the idea that the US is some kind of promised land for Jews. However well things go at the moment, and improve for many minority groups including Jews, there have been such cosmopolitan cultures and promised lands before. It is impossible to predict hundreds of years into the future. On the other hand, going the tiny Jewish country route in a more-or-less hostile world obviously has its risks as well.

Another aspect of the story made me reflect on the US. The survivors tell of the remorseless process of dehumanization that the German policies carried out, clicking the ratchets of restriction, segregation, expropriation, deportation, and down and down, till it ended in ashes around the crematoria. These were all conscious policies engineered out of a fundamentally competitive attitude. The Nazis felt superior in countless ways to the Jews, and wanted their land, their possessions, and everything else they had. And just to turn the screw even more, they played Jews off against each other in their misery, using some to run the ghettos, others to run aspects of the labor camps, even as the Germans themselves rolled the competitive dice on the larger stage by making war against the entire world.

Our own culture traffics in competitive dehumanization as well. To see homeless people trundling their carts around a city, and hear of prisoners in endless solitary confinement is quite disturbing. These people have lost a more individually specific Darwinian struggle, judged by some social process- "the market" in the former instance, and our justice and incarceration systems in the latter. Homelessness in particular seems a specific result of a national ideology: the right-wing combination of individual freedom and low communal responsibility. A bi-partisan commitment to the "competitive spirit". So we see ill-fed and desperate ghosts in our midst, whose only crime was to be born with or into some problem- maybe a bad family, propensity to addiction, or mental derangement- by which they fail the struggle, and become non-persons.

• Social capital was a positive asset to the Nazis, not a negative one, at least in their original quest for power.
• Evolution, music, and sociality.
• Sexism in action.
• Hooray for the girl scouts.
• The common belief fallacy, and what to do about it.
• And religious kowtowing making inroads at the State department as well.
• As if we didn't know already ... David Brooks is not very bright.
• What makes buses low-status?
• Vast methane emissions are not helping the environment.
• Workers should be paid better.
• Economic quote of the week, about what China needs to rebalance its economy towards a consumer focus, which means giving more money to ... consumers. A good idea, not only for China.

"Three strands are needed: firstly, reducing the incentives for investment by putting in place fairer resource prices, interest rates, and distributing dividends from state-owned enterprises, secondly, boosting household incomes through higher wages and lower social security contributions, and thirdly, lowering precautionary savings by continuing to strengthen the social safety net and increase spending on pensions and healthcare."